High performance computing (HPC) environments continually test the limits of technology and require peak performance from their equipment—including storage. As the growth of data in HPC is constantly expanding, optimizing performance, increasing uptime and lowering costs become vital components to any future-looking HPC storage architecture. Furthermore, with the addition of new security requirements instituted for Controlled Unclassified Information (CUI) by recent United States presidential administrations to protect government agencies and grant research data, environments are now, or will soon be, subject to CUI data management policies compliant with NIST 800-171 guidelines. Join us to learn how the Advanced Computing Center for Research and Education (ACCRE) at Vanderbilt University scaled storage for their networked computer cluster and hear from ACCRE’s Technical Director and Lead Developer Alan Tackett. Housing over 10,000 computational cores, the ACCRE Big Data cluster is used for a wide variety of services, from supporting research across their vast campus to processing complex scientific research from data-intensive environments like CERN and providing tape backup services to multiple external partners.
Dr. Tackett will discuss the ACCRE research computing platform’s unique and internally developed file system, LStore. The session will include representatives from technology partners Teradactyl and Spectra Logic. Teradactyl specializes in software for data assurance and protection of file systems for high-performance computing and wide area networks. They also designed, built, tested and put into production custom industrial purpose-built backup appliances (PBBA) for ACCRE’s ecosystem. Spectra Logic builds some of the world’s largest storage systems, developing and delivering data storage solutions that solve the problem of short- and long-term digital preservation for business and technology professionals dealing with exponential data growth. Spectra provided ACCRE with a hybrid storage architecture that enables direct end user access to archival storage and infinite scalability. ACCRE’s new deployment has been able to reduce annual storage operating charges for their backup clients by over 50 percent.
